Tuesday, Nov 29, 2016, 1:13 pm

What Paul Krugman Gets Wrong About the Working Class

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Only if we see economic stratification and racial resentment as interrelated—rather than presenting them, as Krugman does, as mutually exclusive explanations—do we have a viable strategy for dealing with either one. (Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images)

In the wake of a disastrous Election Day, does the Democratic Party need to present economic policies that have more to offer the majority of voters? Don’t bother, argues New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (11/25/16).

Krugman begins by acknowledging what some have denied—that class played some role in what happened on November 8: “What put Donald Trump in striking distance was overwhelming support from whites without college degrees,” he writes. “So what can Democrats do to win back at least some of those voters?”

The columnist says that Bernie Sanders—not one of Krugman’s favorite people—suggests it needs

candidates who understand that working-class incomes are down, who will “stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry.”

But Krugman doubts this would do any good. First off, there’s the media:

Any claim that changed policy positions will win elections assumes that the public will hear about those positions. How is that supposed to happen, when most of the news media simply refuse to cover policy substance?

The corporate media aversion to covering substantive election issues that Krugman cites is very real; FAIR has been documenting it for decades, and it was in full effect in 2016.

But as for how voters might hear about parties’ economic proposals despite media disinclination to cover them, the roughly $300 million the major party candidates spent on campaign advertising—three-fourths of which was spent by Hillary Clinton—provides an obvious answer. Candidates’ self-serving policy claims are no substitute for independent media examination of issues from the voters’ point of view, but ads do give well-funded candidates an opportunity to deliver any kind of message they choose.

Clinton, as it happens, mostly chose not to deliver messages about issues. UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck did an analysis of 2016 presidential campaign advertising that she wrote up in the New York Times (11/23/16), and the results were striking:

Both candidates spent most of their television advertising time attacking the other person’s character. In fact, the losing candidate’s ads did little else. More than three-quarters of the appeals in Mrs. Clinton’s advertisements (and nearly half of Mr. Trump’s) were about traits, characteristics or dispositions. Only 9 percent of Mrs. Clinton’s appeals in her ads were about jobs or the economy. By contrast, 34 percent of Mr. Trump’s appeals focused on the economy, jobs, taxes and trade.

But from Krugman’s point of view, it doesn’t matter that Clinton mostly chose not to make economic arguments to the voters; his larger point is that economic arguments don’t really matter in politics:

The fact is that Democrats have already been pursuing policies that are much better for the white working class than anything the other party has to offer. Yet this has brought no political reward.

His example of the political uselessness of improving people’s lives is Obamacare:

Consider eastern Kentucky, a very white area which has benefited enormously from Obama-era initiatives…. Independent estimates say that the uninsured rate [in Kentucky’s Clay County] fell from 27 percent in 2013 to 10 percent in 2016. That’s the effect of the Affordable Care Act, which Mrs. Clinton promised to preserve and extend but Mr. Trump promised to kill.

Mr. Trump received 87 percent of Clay County’s vote.

Now, one of the basic ideas behind Obamacare is that people who think that they can’t afford health insurance should be forced through increasingly heavy fines to buy it anyway. While this may or may not be good economics, it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s bad politics: When asked for their judgment on the ACA, people tend to disapprove more than they approve by about a 10 percentage point margin.

Yet this is Krugman’s main example of the help Democrats have delivered to ungrateful workers.

It’s hard to imagine a population so disinterested in material wealth that this kind of dramatic redistribution of resources would not have an impact. And indeed, there are signs of profound trauma among the white working class, in the form of increasing mortality from addiction and suicide (FAIR.org, 2/3/16).

But Krugman joins in the widespread presumption that, in fact, these large-scale economic shifts have had no real political consequence. “Let’s be serious here,” he says assuredly. “You can’t explain the votes of places like Clay County as a response to disagreements about trade policy.” Based, apparently, on the fact that voters in Clay County weren’t excited about being compelled to buy health insurance.

You get rather a different picture if you look at the exit polls—which, imperfect as they are, are the best evidence we have for who voted for which candidate. The results for 2016 are not too surprising: Like a typical Republican, Donald Trump did better with voters who were white, male, older (45+) and more affluent ($50,000+/year).

The more interesting results come if you compare the exit polls for 2016 with those for 2012—in other words, a year where the Republican won the electoral college vs. one in which they lost. (The New York Times has a handy interactive feature that allows you to see shifts in voting patterns from election to election.) Here we see that the changes that gave Trump the victory are not the ones you’d expect: Among all white voters, he did only 1 percentage point better than Romney—who lost the popular vote by 3.9 percentage points. This is because Trump’s 14-point gain among whites without college degrees was almost canceled out by a 10-point loss among college-educated whites.

No, the real secret to Trump’s success is that while he did poorly among voters of color, he did less poorly than Romney did—he was beaten by 7 fewer points among African-Americans, 8 less with Latinos and 11 points less with Asian-Americans. This is despite running a campaign that echoed white supremacist themes and was openly endorsed by neo-Nazis. Why? As Christian Parenti, a progressive journalist who watched weeks of Trump’s speeches, related (Jacobin, 11/22/16):

Contrary to how he was portrayed in the mainstream media, Trump did not talk only of walls, immigration bans and deportations. In fact, he usually didn’t spend much time on those themes…. Choppy as they were, Trump’s speeches nonetheless had a clear thesis: Regular people have been getting screwed for far too long and he was going to stop it.

Was it that message that resulted in voters making less than $30,000 shifting by 16 percentage points in the direction of Trump? Or was it the lack of a compelling economic message from Clinton that caused left-leaning poor people to stay home, allowing Republican gains by default? Either way, the striking class-based shifts in voting are glossed over by analyses like Krugman’s, which prefer to see working-class voters as driven by entirely irrational resentments.

The flipside of economics not causing the Democrats’ problems, of course, is that you don’t have to change economic policies to solve those problems. In part, this is because the economic woes of working-class America are insoluble; as Krugman says:

Nobody can credibly promise to bring the old jobs back; what you can promise—and Mrs. Clinton did—are things like guaranteed healthcare and higher minimum wages.

This is a very attractive cop-out. The reality is that the loss of jobs and upward transfer of wealth were the result of conscious choices by Washington policy-makers, and those policies could be changed. (Economist Dean Baker has written a book about this, aptly named Rigged.) But acknowledging this means abandoning the Democratic Party’s attempts to build a winning electoral coalition of wealthy whites and people of color—serving the economic interests of the affluent and addressing only the social and cultural concerns of people of color.

As Michael Lind put it in a New York Times piece (4/16/16) declaring that this new coalition (dubbed “Clintonism”) was the future:

The Clintonian synthesis of pro-business, finance-friendly economics with social and racial liberalism no longer needs to be diluted, as it was in the 1990s, by opportunistic appeals to working-class white voters.

As I pointed out at the time, though (FAIR.org, 4/25/16), voters of color are interested in economics as well as civil rights issues—suggesting that “corralling [Democratic voters] up again for a Clintonist future is going to be more difficult than Lind and his colleagues in corporate media want to believe.”

Krugman ends his column with a shrug, presenting the attraction of Trump for working-class voters—characterized as “white working-class” voters, the better to pigeonhole them—as a mysterious phenomenon that needs to be puzzled over:

Democrats have to figure out why the white working class just voted overwhelmingly against its own economic interests, not pretend that a bit more populism would solve the problem.

It’s far from clear what “figuring this out” this would do for the Democrats—give them clues for better “messaging,” enable them to deploy the right celebrity endorsements? When you get down to it, to attribute voters’ choices to irrational resentments is to put them beyond the reach of rational persuasion—in other words, to give up on them.

To do the opposite—to refuse to concede working-class voters to the right wing—does not mean ignoring the role of white nationalism in Trump’s victory. Racism and xenophobia are key ideologies in Trump’s coalition, which disproportionately attracts believers in racial superiority.

Finding racial and cultural enemies is the natural tendency of far-right movements that gain strength from economic dislocation. They will likely continue to grow without a strong counter-argument from the left that solidarity and not scapegoating is the solution to workers’ problems. Only if we see economic stratification and racial resentment as interrelated—rather than presenting them, as Krugman does, as mutually exclusive explanations—do we have a viable strategy for dealing with either one.

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Posted by Web Developer on 2017-02-12 22:08:43

I like the one comment he made, but agreed, the man is a tool.

Posted by ggetaclue on 2017-01-03 12:39:48

I'd like to take a bunch of these smug, liberal East Coast writers who have never really worked for a living and put them on a farm for a Summer...work the crap out of them and feed them bologna sandwiches and cows milk the entire time. Then see what they have to write about the fly over states.

Posted by Jimney123 on 2016-12-18 21:16:16

Robert Reich, despite his support for Clinton, got it. His article warning Clinton about the fact that she was not getting it was prescient of the election results:

Does Hillary Get It?Saturday, July 23, 2016, robertreich (dot) org

"There are no longer “moderates.” There’s no longer a “center.” There’s authoritarian populism (Trump) or democratic populism (which had been Bernie’s “political revolution,” and is now up for grabs)."

Posted by FactsSaveLives on 2016-12-04 12:45:57

And now we have an even bigger hoaxster as president.

Posted by FactsSaveLives on 2016-12-04 08:26:14

"There is little discussion or analysis on voter suppression. In places like Wisconsin and North Carolina and Florida, the state governments put in place serious impediments to voting by minorities and younger voters,two groups which Clinton needed to win those states."

State laws disenfranchising ex-felons is a key mechanism of voter suppression. Gore lost in Florida by some hundreds of votes. But - as noted in 2000, and as discussed in Alexander's The New Jim Crow " - "had the 600,000 former felons who had completed their sentence in Florida" been allowed to vote, Gore would have won.

Posted by abramawicz on 2016-12-03 13:08:42

"Regardless of who is more right...Bernie Sanders or Paul Krugman.... does not matter. I think that all forms of media are trying to downplay how much race, sexism, homophobia etc. played a role the outcome of the election.

Posted by abramawicz on 2016-12-03 12:42:56

The era of the Clintons is over.

Posted by anyone2 on 2016-12-03 12:26:52

And yet Carville sat there on MSNBC stating that most, more than half of all Democrats are okay with things as they are. He literally believes that.

Posted by HopeWFaith on 2016-12-03 02:06:19

Krugman represents the worst ideas dragging the Democratic Party down. He never had any objectivity about the facts on the ground, the very long-term, loyal and ethical behaviors from the Bernie Sanders decades of service to the people. That alone disqualifies Krugman from being listened to on plans of action. His attitude is still up there in the rafters, far, far away from the realities down here on the working man's ground level.

Let us focus on the ideas and understanding from those who have a clue. There are good, ethical voices out there. Let us pull them into the inner circle of democratic discussions, get the focus narrowed down to the top 10 points we need to share with other working class voters, across the whole nation. And then let us pull in our friends in Media who DO LISTEN, DO CARE. Ignore the rest of them. They are never going to cooperate until the writing is painted onto the wall in front of them. Just as with the Sanders numbers in the primaries and in his rallies, the media denied, denied, denied, until they could not lie about it any more. The facts were just to clear.

The way to get a forward momentum is to basically ignore (in media) the right wing crazies, and pull steadfastly towards the top priority, the discussion of the People and what we can build together, with them, for them. No other topic should be as important as that, and that of how we can overturn the rigged areas of the systems. Focused discussions on that, calling out the exact legislators and JUDGES on the SUPREME COURT who've failed the PEOPLE, how their decisions impact all of us, and how we overturn them, must be done. No let up, no kindness, no forgiveness. They've done enough damage to destroy the whole nation now, and if we don't get serious about taking back the discussion, the reality on the ground, then no one is going to. In my view, our nation is what's at risk here. Not just a few votes.

Buy up main stream media outlets, left and right. Take over news. Get it done. Spend money where it will help.

Posted by HopeWFaith on 2016-12-03 01:56:13

The Democratic Party establishment is a clueless as the candidate that, by hook and by crook, it foisted on an unenthusiastic rank and file. And that's because these folks and especially including Ms. Rodham Clinton are far more comfortable noshing on Champagne and caviar with their buds on Wall Street than eating a hamburger at McDonald's with a blue-collar worker sans college sheepskin.

Posted by JimmyOlsenCubReporter on 2016-12-02 20:42:44

Too much CaPsLoCKEYParagraphs are good, better than .................Wall of text, no.

That aside, yes basically.

Posted by ggetaclue on 2016-12-02 15:25:38

FAIRY TALE TELLER, maybe a FAIRY….TOO, Krugman is fearful of going out with US COMMON FOLK,just might get diseases …………………………….BETCHA he has never, ever been to a MALL .

Posted by carsrus on 2016-12-02 13:30:25

1st, they need be INDICTED, he for the PONZI SCHEME……….Clinton Foundation, money laundering. And with that Criminal indictment, they need indict HR and Chelsea, all of whom took part in the scheme and grabbed MUCH dirty LUCRE for themselves. Next, Madame Clinton, accessory to MURDER……….BENGHAZIGATE. Perjury, and high Crimes…………EMAILGATE. That one is tough, could be charges with espionage /treason/sedition……………let's see how President Trump's AG goes in that indictment.Now, If I were Donald Trump……………..I'd LEAK some of this OUT, plus……….the POSSIBILITY………….that the Trump Justice Department………just might look at Mr. Obama's EVIL Pact with the SATAN Mullahs of IRAN…………could it be considered AIDING AND ABETTING OUR ENEMY? Might that lead to a charge against # 44 of T R E A S O N. BETCHA………………….BO will quickly PARDON the CLINTON CRIME FAMILY……………….HIMSLEF AND THE TOP CRIMINAL THUGS IN HIS ADMINISTRATION. WHEEW…………….takes off the TABLE President Trump having to do the DIRTY WORK………and insure's BO'S legacy……………in writing:……………………………………ABJECT FAILURE…SERIAL LIAR ………………………………After all this…………..let em, both the Clinton's and Obama's ,RETIRE TO THEIR VILLA'S IN FOREIGN climes, and keep bee's………..to hopefully STING THEM ON THEIR SORRY ASSES !

Posted by carsrus on 2016-12-02 13:25:41

AS MADAME CLINTON IS SO APT TO TELL HER HER HERO Secret Service Detail………….FUCK -OFF

Posted by carsrus on 2016-12-02 13:13:01

5'7" little piece of communist EXCREMENT…………….paul krugman, aka crampon………….is a perfect example of the elitist prigs of academia who live under a ROCK. He is so pathetic……….with his demeaning of White folks without higher education. Well, I have 2 graduate degree's and AM A PROUD DEPLORABLE WHO VOTED FOR PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP. Hey, paulie, MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF US DID .He's the type of a "IVY LEAGUE" nerd who hides…………betcha he hasn't been in a Mall , ever ! Type who WASHES HIS HANDS , 40-50 times a day……………IF HE GOES OUT INTO PUBLIC. AND, the typical elitist little PRICK…………who has NO clue his EXCREMENT IS AS ODIFEROUS as we, the uneducated or undereducated COMMON MAN. F-OFF, u little SHIT…………..and MAN up by telling the truth about leaving Princeton ! YOU didn't retire……………..THEY FIRED YOUR SORRY ASS .

Posted by carsrus on 2016-12-02 13:09:53

There has always been racism, sexism and homophobia and none of that did change with this election, nor would it have changed had Clinton been elected. These "issues" are a distraction and the fact is was and always will be that hundreds of millions of Americans are tired of the fucking they received under the Clinton/Bush regime (carried on by their faithful manservant, Obama) and would have voted for Dippy the One-Eared Elephant, so long as Dippy spoke to them about their economic woes and offered a plan directly attacking the causes (NAFTA CAFTA SHAFTA) for instance.

Bernie would easily have trounced Trump, but the greedy motherfuckers of Wall Street wouldn't have someone who directly adpoted the people's extreme rejection of rule by the 1%.

To express it another way, quoting James Carville, "It's the economy, stupid."

Posted by ggetaclue on 2016-12-01 18:57:08

Clinton was doomed from 2008 when it should have been apparent that the last thing people wanted was more Bush/Clinton/Bush/Clinton. 40 years of being raped by the banksters in their pursuit of their wet dream of a global plantation, which raping occurred thanks to Bush/Clinton policies (help from Reagan/Bush/Thatcher) people were not about to elect another Clinton.

It didn't happen in 2008 and it sure as fuck wasn't going to happen in 2016. It will NEVER happen.

The people have had it with the "new Democrats" who are just fascists and who have beshitted the name "liberal" "leftist" for 2 generations at least.

But the Clintons were not are not and never will be "liberal" or "progressive." They are servants of Wall Street who will now make any desperate claim to retain control of a narrative they lost years ago.

And their means? New fascism? Meet the Old fascism: the Russians? REALLY? *gag*; the McCarhyite list of "fake news" when our very own Ministry of Truth (aka the "mainstream media" more accurately, the "corporate media") are the biggest liars by co-mission and omission?

It's falling apart around them, but this is what happens when you starve enough peasants. They start sharing crumbs, then it's curtains for the "elite" --

Yeah, there very well could be another Civil War in the USA. But it won't be the civil war the elites would love to start and have been trying to provoke for years -- this time, it'll be an all-out class war and it won't be pretty on Wall Street.

I have great hopes that we can peaceably retake control and restore some balance to the economy. We can start by acknowledging that if you're a government, deficits really don't matter. Fed aside, the government still has the power to coin money and it can issue as much "currency" as is needed.

In times like this when middle and low income people are hanging on by their fingernails, you do NOT cut government services. When you think about it, government services is the only bloody reason to have a goddamned government in the first place.

AUSTERITY? NO. They should be sending piles of cash to every American household. Know what people do with it? They spend it. Talk about stimulating the economy.

Instead of giving money to banksters, give it to homeowners so they can PAY DOWN THEIR MORTGAGES. See how that would work? Banks would end up with the money, anyway.

ONLY what happened was, they ended up with the MONEY AND THE PROPERTY.

This all happened because Bush/Clinton policies opened the floodgates for predatory capitalists, who decided your job costs them too much oh, and your savings/pension? That's theirs too.

If the Clintons have any sense at all they will retire to their villas in foreign climbs and keep bees, quietly and out of public view.

Posted by ggetaclue on 2016-12-01 18:46:10

I partially agree, proven successful Democratic, Krugman, Keynesian economics with a much much stronger populist message. Also, yes the white working class has and is susceptible to voting against their own interests. For several reason's, their parents, especially dad, were intolerant and xenophobic, even c. A failure of our education system to provide a basic sound education in civics, American History, economics, domestic and foreign affairs, this critical knowledge and understanding cannot be over emphasized in a democracy and cannot wait until college. And the understanding and realization that the over whelming number of jobs in the future are going to require advanced or specialized education. When you lack education in the 21st century you lack job mobility. When your education limits you to the shrinking job market of the 20th century, yes you run scared and are more than susceptible to the demagogues siren song..

Posted by jimrussell on 2016-11-30 13:09:25

There is little discussion or analysis on voter suppression. In places like Wisconsin and North Carolina and Florida, the state governments put in place serious impediments to voting by minorities and younger voters,two groups which Clinton needed to win those states. That she lost them narrowly testifies to the effectiveness of the state governments. What could remedy the situation? Little because in combination with manipulation of counts and reduced numbers of voting places in key precincts the state of democracy in the USA is severely handicapped.

Posted by radami1 on 2016-11-30 05:45:26

The media ignored Trump's recalibrating his message to emphasize economics.Can you imagine Paul Krugman deigning to attend a Trump rally to hear for himself Trump's actual messaging and talk to voters outside the NY bubble? That would be, like, real journalistic work. So much more satisfying and easier to peruse the morning's NYT at breakfast and crank out another column pinning everything on racism. Lazy.

Posted by quesrty on 2016-11-30 02:00:24

Regardless of who is more right...Bernie Sanders or Paul Krugman.... does not matter. I think that all forms of media are trying to downplay how much race, sexism, homophobia etc. played a role the outcome of the election. I am really tired of hearing about the "lot" of the angry non-educated white male. America is a really diverse society and the majority voted for Clinton, regardless of how she campaigned and regardless of the Sanders phenomenon. The electoral college is the root of the issue because it affected how the campaigns were strategized. I currently live in Colorado, and the Hillary ClintonCampaign had a huge ground game here - Clinton and her many surrogates, Bernie Sanders included all campaigned here extensively. Hillary won Colorado pretty substantially. If the rust belt was ignored or taken for granted..then that was certainly a huge mistake. But there are non-educated white males here in Colorado and this state still went blue. Please media..stop ignoring all other races, genders etc of this country...you are not telling the real story of what happened here.

Posted by Dana Clark on 2016-11-29 18:14:25

Abandon yesterdays politics. Main stream media wont cover real issues, stop covering main stream media. It is time to stop pandering to main stream media, beyond marketing hype and public relations lies, now they are just another blogger channel riding on the last millenniums media domination.

Stop bothering trying to change them, simply focus on independent media and getting the message out to people direct. One on one direct promotion of core issues, bring the discussion of political policy back to the dinner table, as an important family ritual.The working class need help with many issues, search for the issues they need help with and provide that help, along with that provide policy messaging and simple clear reasons for why, certain social systems work for the many and why others will only ever work for the few.Give up on the ludicrous who is having sex with whom messaging that has completely derailed progressive politics, this done purposefully, all workers rights are being run roughshod over by corporations and the left has been lead into a blind alley on who is having sex with whom (LGBT has become the stupid bait for progressives, that abortion is for conservatives, dividing both and leaving them ripe for exploitation, this done purposefully to ensure economic issues are ignored).

Posted by rtb61 on 2016-11-29 17:30:23

I think it likely that the Sanders campaign was Clinton's downfall. That campaign brought a populist argument on economic inequality as an issue into the campaign. Trump opened his campaign with "racial and/or xenophobic expressions" but seeing the success Bernie was having brought in a strong dose of populist economics. Though Sanders was comparatively light in connecting Clinton to the problem, Clinton was ill-positioned to defend herself. Though "deplorables" are generally not adept at making sophisticated connections, the sense that "It's rigged!" was easily available.

Trump skillfully manipulated voters' resentments and earned a restive base, some of whom are angry about the economic screwing we've been getting from politicians beholden to wealthy benefactors, and some of whom are emboldened by racial and/or xenophobic expressions accepted as a new definition of what's "politically correct". Many of us doubt that he's serious about alleviating the former group, and has now unleashed something vile and uncontrollable in the latter.

Posted by ADKRambler on 2016-11-29 14:21:19

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